


A Working Definition in Negative Space

by Margo_Kim



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Denial of Feelings, Dorian Backstory, During Canon, Feelings Realization, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 05:37:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12788172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: Here is what they are not, in the hopes of learning what they are.





	A Working Definition in Negative Space

Here is what it is not: it is not convenient.

You know what convenience is, you have chased it in spite of your choice (no choice at all except that you’ve chosen to honor the choice you never made). You've fucked men based on the ease at which they enter and leave your life--silently, taking and leaving nothing. You've spared each other the burden of names even when you knew them. When your skin and their skin seals together in the pact of sweat and silence that defines your life, you are strangers meeting once. You do not know them when they separate. They do not know you. You return to the party, a few minutes apart, and neither of you feel anything when you ignore the other's eyes. You spat each other out, wiped each other way.

Convenience is coins passed over a counter or under a table, to a shrewd eyed woman who memorizes your sins for insurance you hope she never claims, or to a silken man who smells like someone turned adultery into cologne and he promises with his touches that maybe, someday, perhaps, you two will get to know each other. Convenience is whores in brothels—not slaves, no. A slave would never love you and sometimes you need to pretend.

(And yet later, far later, when you are south and the world is colder and its sharp edges have sliced through the gauze you so blithely blindfolded yourself with, you will wonder how you knew they weren't slaves at all, what proof you had besides the promises of shrewd, silken liars who wanted your money and shame so badly. Bathe in the snow melt, and think on the matter awhile. When the man who is not convenient asks what's wrong, don't say a fucking thing. When he offers you the warmth of his side, resist temptation, just this fucking once. If you stay in the water long enough, your body won't feel your own anymore. You could close your eyes and forget the configuration of your limbs.)

Here is another thing it is not: it is not love.

You don't want love, not really, or you want it the way that a child wishes to be a pirate or a king. You want it because wanting is fun, and all the more when you know nothing about what you want. You've read the same poems as everyone else, allowed yourself to assume the feminine so that male writers would speak sonnets to you. It amazes you how men may love women, in public, in sunlight, heart and cock laid bare for all to see. You have never held a hand. You think that you would not wish to. There is something uncouth about love poetry, something titillating in its perversion. You cannot make eye contact with the man whose cock you just sucked in a cloakroom at the opera house, but a man and woman may stand before all the world and declare their intentions to relentlessly fuck until a baby comes out. Remarkable, and people remark upon it, upon the position of the womb, the heat of the seed, the fertility of the line, the heaviness of the breasts that mean a babe grows, the slenderness of the calves that means she'll forever be barren. The married couple, the woman and man, are bound by church and state to copulate until evidence of their fucking bursts forth. The ultimate contribution to society.

You don't want that. You have never wanted that, to watch a woman you can't love distend with proof of your mandated coupling, and how would those wretched nights go, you try not to wonder. Perhaps with her on her stomach so you wouldn't need to look, so you could close your eyes, lay palms upon the genderless back. She could be anyone, as she clenched the sheets and endured what you dutifully inflicted. She would swell with your capitulation, until your weakness breached, horrible living screaming bloody proof of what a good husband you were. And you would have to love it, that thing you’d sired. You would have to, what good man wouldn’t, even though you hated the mother, hated the conception, hated the pregnancy, hated the need, the endless clamoring snickering whispering, all of Tevinter in your bed chambers, demanding you mount her. Demanding she let herself be mounted. How you'd hate each other, your bodies mutual violence. How you'd hate whatever came of such a blighted marriage.

(Your father hated your mother who hated your father who honored his father by marrying your mother who honored her mother by marrying your father. How could you have ever expected them to love you? They loved you as vases are loved, beautiful things built for receiving whatever is given them, so you smashed yourself against the floor.)

If you have no working definition of love—that is to say _Love_ , in its poetic reality, though you’ve suspected the poets have made up whatever they needed to get that last rhyming couplet—that shouldn’t concern you. You find it in the negative. You paint it with black whatever Love is not, and someday you’ll see the shape. It’s a math problem of endless subtraction. Too simple to ever interest Felix (whom you loved but didn’t want to fuck—that’s one hit of the hammer against chisel). Too complex to ever solve Rilienus (whom you loved but couldn’t trust—another bit of the marble chips off).

The key to sculpting is knocking off whatever the statue isn’t. Some artist said that once. You can’t remember who. When you studied art history, there was a boy with curly black hair that sat in front of you. You spent three months memorizing the wave of his ear.

(You tell this to the man you do not love, lingering for unknown reasons in his bed after the fucking is done. He laughs with you. Somehow you’ve never thought of this as a funny story before, not until you described for him the largeness of your eyes and the deafness of your ears all through that class. You joke with him about puberty, how it robbed you of a good year of schooling at least, and he tells you about imekari too young to visit the tamassrans but old enough to be desperate for the kind of touch that had never seemed important before now. When qunari fall in love, it’s then.  Kids fucking other kids before they got new names, new roles, before duty branded them with something other than youth.

You don’t ask him if he ever fell in love. You don’t ask because you want to know, and you’re mature enough at last to distrust what you want.)

You don’t love him because you’ve never loved. It’s a simple enough conclusion.

Here is a third thing it is not: it is not familiar.

You don’t love him because you’ve never loved—true, simple, easy—but you don’t love him in way you don’t recognize. You don’t love him the way a stomach doesn’t hunger or a body doesn’t ache—not craving but satiety. Fullness. From what you know about love, you know it makes you claw your skin off, beat your breast, weep till bloody. People have died for love; you’ve made puppets of their corpses. You don’t think you’d die for him, but you don’t want him to die. There’s a discomfort in the mismatched certainty. In battle, you engulf him in what protection you have to offer, because you don’t know what you would choose were he hurt. You don’t care to learn the answer. You wouldn’t be happy about it either way.

He takes a spear to his shoulder. You rain fire from the sky. It doesn’t mean anything, you tell him in the hospital tent. He takes your hand anyway. You let him take it. You don’t take it back.

He sleeps. You don’t.

In the morning, he persists in living. His all gender gang of boys thump him everywhere the wound isn’t and express at great volume their disappointment in his continued existence. Stitches checks stitches. Grim looks grim. Krem brings you tea. He assures you unprompted it is unpoisoned. Krem tells you to get your beauty sleep. You tell him you’re always beautiful. It’s almost comfortable. You can feel one single eye upon you, watching your first polite conversation. The Altus and the Soparati, bonding over the Qunari.

Unfamiliar. To the entire world, you imagine.

You go to a bedroom that feels like your old quarters in Minrathous. A place you used to belong that’s now just a place. You sleep here most nights when you’re not on the road, you dress here, read here, work here, but it has ceased, and you don’t know when, to be your place. Falling into bed feels like trespassing. Maybe this is what exile means. It turns the definition of _home_ into wherever you aren’t. The hospital tent felt more your own, and it wasn’t even your injury.

You sleep till dusk, on top of the covers, feet dangling over the edge. The cold stirs you and the dark wakes you. While you were sleeping, someone’s brought fire for your hearth. The servants will do that for you now, and you imagine it’s unflattering how grateful you are to be at last tolerated. You light the tinder with a flick of your wrist, and the room flares orange and red as sunset. You think _set the curtains on fire once_ , and laugh alone.

You cast fire to save him too. He pulls it from you. _Love is a dragon_ , you think. Fire breathing. Not that you’re in love. But he’d like that. If love is a dragon. Magnificent, soaring, sublime, dangerous. A ruckus. A novelty. A source of good, sturdy boots.

You’ve never given much thought to the sturdiness of your boots before.

The marble chips away. The detail work remains.

It is not a statue or a vase, not a contract, not a purchase. Not a lie. Not a sin. Not a sonnet.

Here is what it is: a lot.

It’s the free tankard of Ferelden ale, and the hangover that never came.

It’s the pocketed pastry from your missed breakfast hand-delivered to you for lunch. It’s the crumbs in the centuries-old book. It’s laughter in the library.

It’s the blister at last a callus. It’s thick woolen socks.

It’s the glass of wine—red, vintage, _good_ —drank out of a hip flask still warm from the hip. It’s the bread and cheese pulled from the bag. It’s the horse blanket spread on the ground in Dales upwind from a giant corpse. It’s the spluttering disbelief that this is what certain barbarian mercenaries think a picnic is.

It’s the silence like sunfall, like warmth and light are silent. It’s silence like the bedroom, not the grave.

It’s the hand on the chin. It’s the pause. It’s the permission.

You and he are flesh and blood and fire. And blankets. And boots.

Here is what it is: it is the kiss, in the sunlight, on the horse blanket, on the battlefield, among the ruins of history yet to pass. It is the distance between you and him cut in half and half and half until not even the most determined mathematician could deny that you two must, at last, collide.  


End file.
